Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems have facilitated increased productivity and reduced costs in analyzing and communicating data in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Electronic systems providing these advantageous results often include shared resources. However, designing and building systems that efficiently access and utilize a shared resource is often challenging. Coordinating the access to shared resources can be highly complex and resource intensive.
Memory or storage is usually a very important component of a number of systems. Memories typically store information utilized by a system in performance of a number of different tasks. Other components of a system typically request access to a memory in order to retrieve (e.g., “read”) information from or forward (e.g., “write’) information to the memory. Different types of memories (e.g., bulk storage, main memory, removable memory etc.) and or memory “spaces” (e.g., virtual, physical, etc.) can be utilized to support information storage.
Different types of memory can potentially offer different features. For example, different types of memories typically have different relative storage capacities and relatively different access speeds. Traditionally, systems that have relatively large storage capacity have relatively slow access speeds and systems that have relatively fast access speeds have relatively small storage capacities. For example, main system memories are relatively fast compared to bulk storage memories but typically store less information. A number of systems transfer chunks of information between relatively fast small memories and relatively slow bulk memories in an attempt to optimize speed and capacity.
Traditional computer systems also often run programs that utilize virtual memory space addressing. Typically the computer system performs a translation or mapping between the virtual memory space addressing and physical memory space addressing. The translation or mapping usually involves swapping in and out and aligning blocks of information between relatively faster and smaller memories and larger memories or bulk storage. When a program wishes to access a virtual address whose corresponding information is not located in the smaller memory the system retrieves the information from a larger memory or bulk storage. Coordinating the retrieval when information is not resident in the faster memories can be rather complicated and time consuming as processes wait for the information to be retrieved.